Semantic Service Substitution in Pervasive Environments

A computing infrastructure where " everything is a service " offers many new system and application possibilities. Among the main challenges, however, is the issue of service substitution for the application execution in such heterogeneous environments. An application would like to continue to execute even when a service disappears, or it would like to benefit from the environment by using better services with better QoS when possible. In this article, we define a generic service model and describe the equivalence relations between services considering the functionalities they propose and their non-functional QoS properties. We define semantic equivalence relations between services and equivalence degree between non-functional QoS properties. Using these relations we propose semantic substitution mechanisms upon the appearance and disappearance of services that fit the application needs in a pervasive environment. We developed a prototype as a proof of concept and evaluated its efficiency over a real use case. Reference Biographical notes: Noha Ibrahim holds a 'Diplôme d'Ingénieur' from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Informatique et de Mathématique Appliquée de Grenoble (ENSIMAG), and a PhD from National Institute for Applied Sciences (INSA Lyon). Her dissertation focused on providing a spontaneous service integration middleware adapted for pervasive environnements. Noha Ibrahim is currently Associate Professor in the Grenoble Informatics Laboratory (LIG) where she works on service composition framework for optimizing queries and data mining for multime-dia applications. Frédéric Le Mouël is currently Associate Professor in the National Institute for Applied Sciences of Lyon (INSA Lyon), Telecommunications Department-high-ranked school in France, part of the University of Lyon. He conducts his research in the Center for Innovation in Telecom-munication and Integration of Services (INRIA CITI Lab.) where he is leading the Dynamic Software and Distributed Systems for the Internet of Things research group (DynaMid Team). He joined Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) as Visiting Professor in 2013. His main interests are distributed systems, operating systems, middleware, virtual machines, programming languages, especially in dynamic and autonomic environments. Stéphane Frénot holds a 'Diplôme d'Ingénieur' from INSA Lyon, and a PhD from University Lyon I about distributed information systems in hospitals. Stéphane Frénot is currently Professor at the Center for Innovation in Telecommunication and Integration of Services (INRIA CITI Lab.), Telecommunications Department of the National Institute for Applied Sciences of Lyon (INSA Lyon) and in the Rhône-Alpes Complex Systems Institute (IXXI). He is co-heading the INRIA Dice team and is particularly interested in data, web, programming and geopolitics.